The lights went out. Not just in one city or one country, but across Europe.
That is the premise of Marc Elsberg’s 2012 thriller Blackout, the featured image for this article. The novel explores the consequences of a coordinated cyberattack on Europe’s electricity networks and asks an uncomfortable question: how resilient are the systems we depend upon every day?
When I first read the book, it felt dramatic. More than a decade later, it feels increasingly plausible.
Modern society depends on a vast web of interconnected infrastructure. Electricity powers water treatment works. Telecommunications rely on electricity. Hospitals rely on telecommunications and fuel supply chains. Financial systems depend on data centres. Transport networks depend on all of the above.
We often think of these systems individually. In reality, they are deeply interconnected.
The challenge is not simply preventing failures. It is ensuring that when failures inevitably occur, societies can recover quickly.
When fiction meets reality
In December 2015, a cyberattack disrupted electricity supplies to around 230,000 people in Ukraine, becoming the first publicly acknowledged cyberattack to successfully interrupt power on a national grid. Attackers remotely operated circuit breakers and disabled systems used by operators to restore power.
A decade later, resilience remains firmly in the spotlight.
In April 2025, Spain and Portugal experienced a major blackout that affected millions of people. Trains stopped, traffic lights failed, telecommunications were disrupted and daily life ground to a halt. Investigations concluded that the event resulted from a combination of technical factors that triggered cascading failures across the power system, rather than a cyberattack.
The causes were different. The consequences looked remarkably similar.
Both events remind us that critical infrastructure failures rarely remain isolated.
Why resilience matters more than ever
The energy transition itself is making our systems more complex.
Electricity networks are becoming increasingly digital. Renewable generation is often distributed rather than centralised. Millions of electric vehicles, batteries and smart devices are beginning to interact with the grid in real time. This creates enormous opportunities. It can improve efficiency, reduce emissions and lower costs. But complexity also introduces new vulnerabilities.
Cybersecurity is one example. Artificial intelligence is already helping utilities forecast demand, optimise maintenance schedules and improve system operations. However, the same advances in AI can potentially lower barriers for malicious actors by accelerating the discovery of vulnerabilities, automating phishing campaigns or generating sophisticated attack pathways.
The danger is not necessarily that a single model causes disruption. Rather, increasingly capable technologies may amplify the speed, scale and sophistication of existing threats.
Building resilience
Resilience is often misunderstood as simply having backup systems.
In reality, it involves much more:
- Designing infrastructure with redundancy, so that the failure of one component does not bring down an entire system.
- Improving cybersecurity, particularly for operational technology that controls physical assets.
- Practising recovery procedures, including black-start exercises for electricity systems.
- Diversifying supply chains, reducing dependence on single suppliers or regions.
- Improving communication and coordination between governments, regulators and industry.
- Building community preparedness, ensuring that individuals understand what to do during prolonged disruptions.
Perhaps the most important lesson is that resilience cannot be built by any single organisation acting alone.
The human dimension
Infrastructure resilience is ultimately about people. It is about ensuring that hospitals can continue to provide care. That clean water remains available. That emergency services can respond. That businesses can continue operating and that vulnerable members of society are protected.
Most of us rarely think about the systems quietly working in the background of our daily lives.
Until they stop working.
Looking ahead
The transition to a lower-carbon future will require unprecedented investment in energy infrastructure. It will also require us to think differently about resilience.
Marc Elsberg’s Blackout imagined a world where interconnected systems failed simultaneously. Published in 2012, it was a warning about how dependent modern society had become on critical infrastructure.
Today, that dependence has only increased.
The question is not whether disruptions will occur. Extreme weather events, technical failures, cyberattacks and geopolitical tensions ensure that they will.
The real question is whether we are designing systems capable not only of preventing crises, but of withstanding them and recovering quickly when they happen.
Resilience may not be as visible as a new wind farm or as exciting as the latest breakthrough in artificial intelligence.
But in the energy transition, it may prove to be one of the most important investments we make.
